Giulia Dall’Olio, who lives and works in Bologna, Italy, paints mystical utopian landscapes rich with abstraction. Her engraved oil on panel paintings are dense with layered visual material: murky trees are disrupted by meandering carvings and beautiful washes, as if there’s a gentle rain veiling the composition. The works are polished but purposefully obscured and draw upon the classical genre of landscape painting.

Garrett Klein works primarily with acrylic paint, panel, and plexiglass to create his mixed-media paintings. Klein’s physical layering of materials lends an approachable yet mysterious quality to his paintings. The interaction of each layer creates energetic movement: zig-zags and slaloms of color ground the airy plexiglass. The artist is currently in-residency at Governors Island managed by 4heads. This a New York City non-profit organization created by artists for artists that has produced Governors Island Art Fair since 2008. Touted as New York’s largest independent exhibition, GIAF welcomes over 40,000 visitors annually in New York Harbor. Each season 4heads provides free studio residencies for selected artists. The importance of affordable creative space is essential to the cultural future of New York City. As the cost of work space is beyond the reach of most artists in New York, 4heads felt the need to make some studio spaces available.

French painter, Stéphane Joannes’ large oil on canvas paintings depict solitary cargo ships surrounded by the vast sky and water. The traditional subjects are made contemporary by Joannes’ clean lines, bold delineations of space and hints of abstraction. Born in 1975 in Besançon, France, the painter studied at L’Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg, France. After a visit to Le Havre, a major European harbor and second largest port authority in France, he became fascinated by the large sea ships he saw.

Joannes’ paintings are typically long, horizontal pieces, sometimes diptychs or triptychs over eight feet long. He breaks his paintings up into three distinct sections: the sea, the sky and the sea vessel on the horizon. The air and water seem vast and are often blocked off with a single, bold color. His ships, on the other hand, are incredibly detailed with each drip of rust and weathering carefully articulated.